Salesforce Links Development Platform To Google App Engine
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff unveiled the new Force.com for Google App Engine service Monday at a cloud computing customer event in New York City.
The expanded alliance with Google comes one month after Salesforce announced a similar relationship with Amazon Web Services, debuting Force.com for that company's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) hosted services. The Software-as-a-Service CRM application vendor also offered a link to Facebook.
Force.com is a package of libraries that developers can download into the Google App Engine, allowing Force.com applications to run natively inside the App Engine environment. That gives Force.com developers native access to Google services, such as its online storage service. Google App Engine developers, in return, get native access to Force.com services such as its analytics, security, multilanguage and multicurrency capabilities.
Linking the two cloud-computing development platforms also will provide developers with a way to build cloud applications based on the Python programming language. Python libraries in App Engine can read and write to Force.com through the Force.com API.
The Salesforce-Google link is the latest step among software vendors to connect cloud computing with on-premise and on-demand applications. On Monday, SugarCRM, which develops a commercial open-source CRM application, announced new "Cloud Connectors" for connecting SugarCRM to feeds from third-party data sources such as LinkedIn.